This invention relates to electronic office processing equipment and more particularly to apparatus and a method for entering information into such equipment and later printing it out on a pre-printed form.
What is disclosed is apparatus and a method for quickly and easily adapting electronic office processing equipment to create, enter, edit and store information on templates for pre-printed business forms, and later have the information printed on the forms in specific blank spaces.
In the prior art the use of electronic office processing equipment to automate data entry tasks is well known. In one mode of operation a standard business form is entered into the equipment with blanks on the form to be filled in identified in a special way. In operation a user, such as an insurance claims processor, calls up an appropriate standard form to be displayed on a video display and uses a keyboard to enter appropriate information into the blanks of the form displayed on the screen. After the form is filled in, a key operation by user causes only the data that has been entered into the blanks to be stored. In this manner, the form itself is not stored a multiplicity of times. When it is desired to print outputs of the standard form, filled in which earlier entered and stored data, a special print function is used to print the form with the blanks filled in with a set of previously entered data.
One shortcoming with the above described prior art forms technique is that a form must be typed into the system via the keyboard in order to implement the forms mode. This is impossible for forms that have other than alpha numeric characters thereon.